Friday, August 10, 2012

"Several neighborhoods have reportedly been reduced to rubble as the regime of Syrian President Bashar al-Assad wages a massive ground assault to retake control of Aleppo. According to activists, more than 20,000 people, mostly unarmed civilians, have died in the last 17 months of fighting and tens of thousands have fled the country. On Thursday, almost 2,000 people reached neighboring Turkey as refugee flows continue to rise. About a quarter of a million of Syrians have left the country for neighboring states over the course of the conflict. We go to the Turkey-Syria border to speak with Reese Erlich, a freelance foreign correspondent who has reported from Syria on several occasions. “Apparently, the pattern is, if a neighborhood was the scene of a free Syrian army take over, or even previous demonstrations there, the civilian neighborhood is bombarded from the air all by artilleryand that’s forced a lot of people to leave, the one U.N. estimate was 250,000, just over the last week or so, mostly internally displaced,” Erlich says...."